A trip through the year looking at a Bach cantata each week. Comments, discussions, musings, wibblings are all welcome.

Tuesday, 12 February 2013

Demon Chickens from Hell- Leichtgesinnte Flattergeister- Cantata for the Second Sunday before Lent

Firstly, there's the polysyllabic
obscurity of the title, wonderfully translated as “Frivolous
Flibbertigibbets” or more soberly as “frivolous fluttering
souls”. Then there's the disjointed clucking of the first movement;
and a courtly, brassy finale that seems to come from an entirely
different world. What's going on here? Is it just twelve minutes of oddness?

The
key is the reading that Bach's congregation would have heard on this
Sunday in 1724, the parable of the Sower. More specifically, Bach is
taking his inspiration from the section where the seeds sown have a
range of different fates. Firstly, some seeds fall on the path and
get snapped up the birds; this symbolises those people who are weak
in faith (the leichgesinnte flattergeister, no
less) getting snapped up by the biggest sharp beak of all- the Devil.
It's a strange analogy- but the Man who originally came up with it
had a tendency to come up with rather strikingly odd metaphors-
planks in eyes, camels squeezing through eyes of needles and the
like.

So
Bach brings it to us in musical form. The first movement clucks away
happily, with a motif that John Eliot Gardiner brings out in all its
chicken-ness. But suddenly the tonality shifts and the text moves from
the flighty souls to "Belial und seiner Kinder"- Belial
and his children,who
seek to obstruct the divine word.

Who
is Belial? Literally in Hebrew, it means something like
“worthlessness”, and by Bach's time, he was one of a vast panoply
of demons with juicy names and attributes. Milton talks about him in
Paradise Lost: “BELIAL
came last, than whom a Spirit more lewd Fell not from Heaven, or more
gross to love Vice for it self”. As
ever with the devils in Paradise Lost, he sounds more interesting
than the rather dull angels on the side of good. And here, he's the
dark side of those faintly ridiculous chickens, seeking to snap up the seeds of
the word of God before they grow.

The
alto recitative that follows has some wonderful moments of
tenderness. The theme is stone- some of the seed in the parable falls
on stony ground. The music turns from dry declamation into rich
aria-style singing when lamenting the sad fate of the “Felsenherzen”-
the
people with hearts of stone who “scoff at their own salvation and
are brought down”.

But
the message quickly hardens. The tenor's aria that follows depicts
another part of the original parable, the seeds that fall among
thorns. The score for this is unusually bare, with only a bass line
and vocal part. Various conductors to try to reconstruct a middle
part for another solo instrument. However, I think it works equally
well with a virtuoso improvised keyboard part, as per Helmuth
Rilling's recording. It's full of spikiness, appropriate for those
schädlichenDornen
– tearing, choking thorns . Possibly it would have been Bach
himself at the keyboard, and hence he felt no need to write his own
part out.

And
the soprano gives us the final choice- either we allow our good seed
to be smothered by earthly cares and allow it to lie useless: or we
send it onto the guten
Lande, the
good earth. The glorious final chorus is the depiction of the
heavenly joy, where the seed has come to full growth. It's full of trilling
fanfares and feels like music the entrance of a great prince at
Court. The orchestra is significantly expanded from the previous
austerity. Some people have suggested that this last movement must be
a re-used part of a lost work and that that doesn't quite fit with
the rest of the cantata. But I think the contrast works perfectly; at
last, we hear the seed that bears fruit a hundredfold in musical
form. Bach paints us four perfect little pictures in the cantata: the
devilish birds snapping up the seeds, the tragically rocky hearts,
the choking thorns- and ultimately the joy of a flourishing princely
kingdom.